What is OneNote?

OneNote is a product of Microsoft and is included in Office 365. Every student at Life Pacific College has an Office 365 account. It is a note taking and collaboration tool. The software can be used to create and organize notes, collect and clip from the internet, collect file attachments and use them to study or write papers.

You can keep all of this work in the cloud, if you save everything to OneDrive. If you do that you can access, use, and change things anywhere you have internet access. OR, you can use it on one computer and save all your work on that computer.

How to set up

One way to organize this virtual notebook is to think about it as a notebook.
1 - Create one notebook for each semester you are a student and label them as such, e.g. "Fall 2016".
2 - Create one section for each course you are taking, e.g. "Multicultural Evangelism"
3 - Create on page for each lecture and one for each paper/project.

In class

You can take notes in OneNote, and if you created a page for each lecture, you will be organized for every lecture.

You have a few options for how to use this source. You could just use it to replace pen and paper. But that is a waste of the power of this tool.
1 - ask the instructor to "share" their lecture (power point or word document). If they do, open it within OneNote. You can now take your notes within their document.

2 - ask to audio record the lecture. From the "Insert" tab, there is a "record audio" feature. The beautiful thing about this tool is it creates time stamps when you press enter. I found that a good idea was to start each line with the slide number or outline number from the instructor's file. Now, when you review, you have the lecture synced with the comments of the teach with your notes on the side.
*It is always polite to ask to record a lecture and keep in mind to not record personal comments or prayer.
** another trick is to put exclamation points when the instructor mentions something will be on the test or instructions about the paper AND use question marks if something doesn't make sense. Then you can go back and listen again and again, until it makes sense.

3 - snap a photo of the white board at the end of class and insert that into the page. Microsoft has "Office Lens" app that works well with white boards and papers (even when not directly over the doc).

4 - don't be afraid to "share" your notebook with others in the class. They may share with you. If you are absent you can have the entire class session with recorded audio, slides, student comments and the white board.

For a Paper/Project

With OneNote you can attach all your files to this one page.

I think that the benefit is that you can attach an article from a database onto the paper page, and then copy and paste the citation (from the database "cite" feature) right next to the article.

Beneath the article you can then type your notes.

Open OneNote and Word, next to each other and you can copy/paste your notes into the order of your paper and you can insert your citation as you go.

Of course, you can also record your own audio notes using the "insert", "record audio" feature.

Sharing Notes with OneDrive

The idea of sharing documents with OneDrive is very similar to sharing docs with Google's Drive. One very important thing to remember, everyone must work on it "in the cloud". If anyone downloads the document, they are no longer part of the collaboration and their edits will not appear in the document.

This is great for collaborative projects. Some advice:
1 - assign one person the duty of editor and have them "own" the document (they create the document and share with everyone else).
2 - that person "shares" with everyone and "everyone can edit" the document.
3 - a few days before it is due, the editor should change everyone to "can view" so that they can edit the document and it has one format and one voice in the writing.

To share:
1 - create the document and save it to "OneDrive" - it has to live in the cloud
2 - from the list of documents in OneDrive, set the pointer on the file and click "Share"
3 - "invite" or "add additional people", by entering their email addresses
4 - click "save"
5 - type the email invitation and then click "send"
NOTE - If you saved the document into a folder, you have to set that folder to "shared". This doesn't give access to the contents of the folder, just to the one shared document.